77 réponses à ce sujet

[Reorte]

Mcfly616 wrote...

Reorte wrote...

That's a good part of why the negatives come across as so arbitrary because they only exist to drag Destroy down, not for any good story-related reason. If they actually made sense it would be different but the whole "does not discriminate" thing is nonsense, when killing off all synthetic life instead of just the Reapers is actually a much more complicated thing to do. Have it have quite a big negative impact on Earth, or, much more plausibly, make it something that'll give enough of an edge over the Reapers that victory will still come, but it'll take time, and hence losses. Then Control could be no more losses but a riskier future.

not arbitrary at all. Anything that targets the Reapers would also target EDI and the Geth. Both have Reaper Tech.

"Reaper tech" is far too vague to mean anything. It makes as much sense as something that targets all human tech, so eliminates everything from the Large Hadron Collider to a waterwheel. It's especially bad when "Reaper tech" apparently includes software modifications, so it has to somehow analyse what software is running on any particular platform. Besides, doesn't it claim "all synthetics" and not just "things with Reaper tech"?

[Reorte]

SiniisteR wrote...

With the catalyst's logic of all synthetics eventually causing destruction, I'd say the killing all synthetics thing sort of makes sense.

Not from a "how the hell is that supposed to work?" perspective. Story elements shouldn't just be shoved in and claimed to work just because they fit some (implausible, last-minute) theme.

[Reorte]

Pressedcat wrote...

Or have nothing definitive and leave the player to imagine Shepard's future for themselves...

One of these three choices gives the player far more opportunity to role-play Shepard's fate.

I can imagine what I would like to happen after the end of the story, but to do that I need to know the state of everyone at the end of the story. Otherwise I may as well not bother playing the game at all and headcanon the whole thing.

[Reorte]

Angry British Ace wrote...

StreetMagic wrote...

I don't mind the price paid. Just wish it was clear what the rubble scene is meant to be. I don't know see why the mystery is necessary at this point. I understand if it was meant to be a cliffhanger, but not for a final moment in the story. Shep is better off dead, rather than giving me that little tease.

I like to believe in two reasons about why BioWare wanted this. Firstly, the most optimistic reason for this is that BioWare wanted players to come up with their own resolution for Shepard... rather than being hand-fed a cutscene saying "Shepard goes and has blue babies," they created a way for people to know for certain that Shepard does in fact survive, but leaves it extremely open so people can create their own ending to Shepard's life on their terms.

That doesn't require any ambiguous-looking scene though. There's a whole world between "Shepard is alive, and about to continue with the rest of his life, whatever that may be" and "Now he's playing with his little blue babies."

[Pressedcat]

Well provided you picked destroy and had high enough EMS, Shepard ended up buried under rubble in London. You saw Shepard take one breath, so if you so wish you can imagine Shepard continued to breathe and was at some point recovered and given medical aid.

Sure BioWare could have chosen to show Shepard being rescued, but for whatever reason they left it open for you the player to decide Shepard's fate. Some people are ok (or indeed prefer) this ambiguity, others do not.

Edit: Also, the ambiguity allows you to decide that no, infact your Shepard did not survive the destruction. You might not choose such a future for your Shepard, and I probably wouldn't either, but ther exist those that might.

Modifié par Pressedcat, 25 septembre 2013 - 09:58 .

[Reorte]

Pressedcat wrote...

Well provided you picked destroy and had high enough EMS, Shepard ended up buried under rubble in London. You saw Shepard take one breath, so if you so wish you can imagine Shepard continued to breathe and was at some point recovered and given medical aid.

Sure BioWare could have chosen to show Shepard being rescued, but for whatever reason they left it open for you the player to decide Shepard's fate. Some people are ok (or indeed prefer) this ambiguity, others do not.

I know that, and I don't see the point of it. It feels like "we quit, finish off the story yourself". Not "go ahead and imagine what happens next yourself", which is fine (I've no desire to go and see blue babies or a house on Rannoch - actually that's not entirely true but it shouldn't be in there). After all you can keep working the "you imagine it" argument right back through to the very start of ME1.

[Twilight_Princess]

Reorte wrote...

Pressedcat wrote...



Sure BioWare could have chosen to show Shepard being rescued, but for whatever reason they left it open for you the player to decide Shepard's fate. Some people are ok (or indeed prefer) this ambiguity, others do not.

I know that, and I don't see the point of it. It feels like "we quit, finish off the story yourself". Not "go ahead and imagine what happens next yourself", which is fine (I've no desire to go and see blue babies or a house on Rannoch - actually that's not entirely true but it shouldn't be in there). After all you can keep working the "you imagine it" argument right back through to the very start of ME1.

If they applied that reasoning to the other choices then that would have been a good excuse but they didn't. It's not like a bunch of  blue reapers landed in front of some panicked soldiers and then it cut to black if you picked control. 

Also shepard IS already dead in destroy if your ems isn't high enough therefore "leaving up to you" for the high ems makes no sense at all. This is what I can't stand about how destroy was treated there is no "maaaaaaaybe organics and synthetic life didn't reeeeeally get combined" or "maaaaaaaaybe the reapers are just faking being all blue and controlled". But destroyers have to deal with "maaaaaybe that was shepard's dying breath" even though there's an already existing variation of that. The breath scene should have been replaced with something simple like this



Bare minimum, nothing fancy , just ends on a more hopeful image. Shepard is found and conscious since the hand grips the one reaching for him/her. Shepard isn't alone and it just feels more positive. Also this still allows players to imagine what happens next! Why they couldn't do this I have no idea.

Modifié par Hyrule_Gal, 25 septembre 2013 - 10:33 .

[Iakus]

Pressedcat wrote...
Edit: Also, the ambiguity allows you to decide that no, infact your Shepard did not survive the destruction. You might not choose such a future for your Shepard, and I probably wouldn't either, but ther exist those that might.

SO where's the ambiguity on Shepard's survival in Control and Synthesis?  Why do those have to be so absolute?

[KaiserShep]

Ambiguity is a mistake in this regard. It doesn't really serve much purpose other than to needlessly confound the player. If a character survives in the final moment of his/her story, just show an actual survival and be done with it.

Modifié par KaiserShep, 25 septembre 2013 - 10:58 .

[Pressedcat]

iakus wrote...

Pressedcat wrote...
Edit: Also, the ambiguity allows you to decide that no, infact your Shepard did not survive the destruction. You might not choose such a future for your Shepard, and I probably wouldn't either, but ther exist those that might.

SO where's the ambiguity on Shepard's survival in Control and Synthesis?  Why do those have to be so absolute?

Because in both of those endings the BioWare writers decided that Shepard as a human being ceased to exist. You'd have to ask them why they made that decision; I can't justify it to you since I had no input in the writing.

The simple fact is that high EMS Destroy is the only ending in which Shepard possibly survives, but the writers leave that final choice, and Shepard's possible future, up to the player to decide.

I was simply giving a way in which the ambiguity of that ending might be interpreted as advantageous for the player.

Edit: I would just like to add that I quite like the picture in Hyrule_Gal's post, and probably wouldn't have minded if it had been added in the EC. However, the fact of the matter is that it wasn't. I just find it more constructive to work with what we've got rather than lamenting what might have been.

Modifié par Pressedcat, 25 septembre 2013 - 11:14 .

[Pressedcat]

StreetMagic wrote...

You know, I don't even care if Shepard survived. It's mostly that these scenarios lack a sense of friendship. It's a lonely death. It's mostly a whole lonely questline. The involvement of various friends and squad could be have been better throughout Priority Earth, but the final endings make it even all the more lonely. I don't mind Destroy/Control/Synthesis as ideas, but the whole game is extremely solitary towards the end there. I feel like that's one of the stranger directions on what Mass Effect is all about. A lot of it was written by some egghead who didn't think about putting much value in friendships. They were off in never never land putting more emphasis on action, high concepts, and symbolism.

Though I would agree that a greater involvement of Shepard's various friends and squad-mates would have been most welcome during the majority of Priority Earth, I actually prefer that the final moments were spent alone. I think it is fitting that the final decision be made by Shepard, the player's avatar, in isolation. The final decision boils down to what Shepard, or through Shepard you the player, values most. Sure you might be influenced by the opinions of Shepard's friends, but in the end the decision is yours alone.

[Reorte]

Pressedcat wrote...

I was simply giving a way in which the ambiguity of that ending might be interpreted as advantageous for the player.

Edit: I would just like to add that I quite like the picture in Hyrule_Gal's post, and probably wouldn't have minded if it had been added in the EC. However, the fact of the matter is that it wasn't. I just find it more constructive to work with what we've got rather than lamenting what might have been.

We all know what we've got though, all their is is to discuss what it means and what might have been. Ambiguity isn't advantages because it leaves us with "don't know" rather than "it's up to you."  I suppose it might work if you're not too engrossed with the game, but in that case it's not worked for you as well as intended anyway.

[Pressedcat]

Reorte wrote...

Pressedcat wrote...

I was simply giving a way in which the ambiguity of that ending might be interpreted as advantageous for the player.

Edit: I would just like to add that I quite like the picture in Hyrule_Gal's post, and probably wouldn't have minded if it had been added in the EC. However, the fact of the matter is that it wasn't. I just find it more constructive to work with what we've got rather than lamenting what might have been.

We all know what we've got though, all their is is to discuss what it means and what might have been. Ambiguity isn't advantages because it leaves us with "don't know" rather than "it's up to you."  I suppose it might work if you're not too engrossed with the game, but in that case it's not worked for you as well as intended anyway.

I would say that I, like most people still involved in these forums, am pretty invested in the game. The ambiguity that you interpret as "don't know" I do infact interpret as "it's up to you". As I've said before, people simply have different tastes and what works for one person does not for the next. I can sympathise with you finding a lack of clarity in the ending, and indeed would not be adverse to a little more clarification (as suggested by Hyrule_Gal above), but I personally do not need it to be left satisfied. 

[Pressedcat]

I'm certainly into pnp D&D, and always enjoyed fleshing out my characters' backgrounds and such, but I don't know that I fall into the fan-fiction writing crowd.

[AlanC9]

Reorte wrote...
 Ambiguity isn't advantages because it leaves us with "don't know" rather than "it's up to you."  I suppose it might work if you're not too engrossed with the game, but in that case it's not worked for you as well as intended anyway. 

What's the difference between "don't know" and "it's up to you"?

[Pressedcat]

I'm pretty dependent on the GM too. I tried to run a campaign of my own once, but ended up drowning in the details. I had a lot of ideas I thought would make for an interesting campaign, but got overly ambitious in trying to create world, history and gods and ended up getting so bogged down that the sessions were too infrequent and eventually died a death. Some of the players gave good feedback, but I found the whole experience fairly exhausting. But I digress...

[cooldonkeyfish]

I still think that the starchild is a lying son of a b**ch, and that the 'organics vs synthetics' is just some bull story that it made up to manipulate Shepard. That little guy is a reaper and is lying through it's teeth, Rannoch disproves what it's saying.

[AlanC9]

Rannoch might prove that he's wrong. It doesn't have anything at all to do with whether or not he's lying.

But if believing he's lying makes you feel better, don't let me stop you.

Modifié par AlanC9, 26 septembre 2013 - 03:48 .

[Reorte]

AlanC9 wrote...

Reorte wrote...
 Ambiguity isn't advantages because it leaves us with "don't know" rather than "it's up to you."  I suppose it might work if you're not too engrossed with the game, but in that case it's not worked for you as well as intended anyway. 

What's the difference between "don't know" and "it's up to you"?

Because one of them is "something has happened, and I've no idea what it is" whilst the other is "whatever I make up has happened." Suspend disbelief for a while and pretend that the whole thing is real - in the gaps where you're not told things it's not the situation that whatever you want came to pass, it's simply that something happened but you don't know what it is (even if you can make plausible guesses of it). By and large a story should aim for those gaps to contain things that are either not relevent to the story, or things no-one is particularly interested in.

In a work of fiction the author is god, not the reader or player.

[Iakus]

In the end, the player should have been given a choice on what to sacrifice in order to get a desired result. With Shepard's clear survival a "reward" for a well-played game.

[Chashan]

iakus wrote...

In the end, the player should have been given a choice on what to sacrifice in order to get a desired result. With Shepard's clear survival a "reward" for a well-played game.

All things considered, one certain user put it quite nicely why fundamentally DA:O's end-game worked, found in this thread over on the DA:I-board:

Fast Jimmy wrote...

What I would really like to see? Little to no option offered at the end.

In DA:O, you killed the Archdemon. Blight ended. Sure, you had some choice about the Dark Ritual or the Ultimate Sacrifice, but, all in all, it was one solution - you took the Big Bad down. The endings were still wildly varied and ranged in consequences mainly because it reacted to your choices made throughout the game, not to one big one at the end.

That's what I'd hope to see. A few choices at the end, but no Big Choices at the end. Let the choices the player has been making all game define how the game ends and where the chips fall.

ME3 had all that in the cards for the finale: capitalize on the main steps of ME3's own plot - rallying the Hierarchy with or without Krogan support as a result of the Genophage-decision, Rannoch, Asari - and let the end-game play out with those as the main-factors towards defeating the Reaper-threat.

Somewhat 'conventional', true, although the question need be asked whether a more precise account of the post-war conditions isn't somewhat more imaginative than handing the finger of god to a lone individual.

Said individual's fate being similarly in the player's hands: either take one for the team, or somehow making it through at others' expense.

Modifié par Chashan, 26 septembre 2013 - 04:53 .